Windows 8.1 May Bring Automatic Desktop Display Scaling

The upcoming upgrade to Windows is not low of features, but it appears that another long-awaited feature may finally be coming to Windows 8.1 — automatic desktop display scaling.

Microsoft’s Surface team was invited to a Reddit AMA session in February, where one person inquired about the high resolution display for the tablet, which actually has to be scaled to 150 percent for the desktop UI.

Users were obviously fine with this percentage for the Surface Pro, but wanted the ability to automatically set it to 100 percent on an external display. Windows 8 currently does not allow this.

The Surface team responded back then:

“The Windows team is aggressively working on this feature to fix this for all high resolution Windows devices. We don’t have a date yet to share, so sorry.”

Well, now it seems we may very well be getting a feature like this in Windows 8.1.

An article on WinSuperSite.com reveals that the leaked builds of Windows 8.1 show that the upcoming OS will actually support automatic scaling of the desktop depending on the display. The screenshot above shows the new options in the Display panel of the upcoming operating system.

While this feature works when hooking up a large display to a Windows 8.1 PC, and users are said to able to control the display settings of each monitor separately, this is still not completely ready.

Fingers crossed, it is by the time the BUILD developer conference comes rolling around in June.